New House: Part 4

Subtitle: The Story of the New Front Door.

Please look carefully at these two photos of the original front door to our New House:



In the top photo, you'll notice that it is decidedly uneven on the top, and someone has inserted some small boards to fill the space. There was also visible light under the bottom of the door and, on hot days, you could stand just inside the door and feel heat radiating in. Not good. The bottom photo of the outside shows that it was not much better out there - that storm door is in rough shape, as was the door jamb underneath.

Given all of that, it was readily apparent to us that the door would need to replaced before winter descended. We put it off for a while, doing smaller projects like painting, decorating, and furniture assembly (more on that later). Eventually, my mom put us in touch with the family contractor, a very nice man named Rob. We set up an appointment for him to come over and take a look. 

I was not home when Rob came over to check out the door, but the news from Andy was not so good. You see, our house was built in 1942. This was before construction standards were, well, standardized. That means our front door is what you'd call a "non-standard" size. Turns out that meant we'd have to custom order a non-standard storm door and front door. We had initially thought we'd replace the back door too (also a non-standard size) but that got put on the back burner for now, since it is still in decent shape and the custom order almost doubled the price!

We inspected a few other doors that Rob had worked on and made our choice. After a few weeks of waiting for the door to come in, Rob showed up at our house one day in October and I came home from work to this, our brand new door:



It's a huge, ridiculously wonderful improvement, no? And Rob gave us a good deal since he knows my mom and has done so much work on their house. There is definitely something to be said for customer loyalty. As for the old front door, we still have some scraps from door demolition left in our backyard:

So glad it's gone. 

And now, gratuitous Calvin photo of the day, just because no blog post is complete without a picture of our cute cat:

IMAG0528
He was sitting on the bed this morning, watching me get ready for the day. Awww.

Comments

Mom said…
Big improvement. Cute cat. He will not even remember me. . .
Santini said…
At long last, the front door story. It's a pretty good one, as front door stories go.

Your Uncle Jim (TT) was born in 1942, the same year your house was built.
Mom said…
So does that mean TT is also non-standard?